Michael K. Smith's Blog, page 9

The Great Replacement Theory Foretold

“Atsome future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilizedraces of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage racesthroughout the world.”

---CharlesDarwin, The Descent of Man

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Scott Ritter Calls Out Vietnam Era Anti-War Protesters For Treason To The Cause

"I was surrounded in the United States by people of the Vietnam era and they spoke of the necessity of Reviving The Spirit of the Vietnam protests. And they went into the streets and they protested and they screamed and they did what they did and then they disappeared because they were very much the Weekend Warriors, they were the Summer Soldiers. They didn't have what it took to stick out the fight. Some people did, but by and large these passionate protesters succumbed to the reality of the time, the reality that for a protest to succeed it needs to be sustainable, but they did claim to be morally based and I've watched them over the years attempt to revive the passion of protest  and they've been unable to do so because at the end of the day they lack the passion. What we're finding out is they lack the conviction, they are simply empty suits or should we say empty tied-dyed T-shirts. These are not protesters anymore, these are the fake of the fake . . . . The students today have picked up the baton they are running with this issue, they are doing what you and I were demanding of others back when we were trying to stop the Iraq War.

. . . They are on their own volition stepping up to the battle line, they are doing battle, and they are paying the price these are not Weekend Warriors; these aren't Summer Soldiers; these are committed protesters for a cause that they deeply believe in. And at this time at this moment in history this is where those Vietnam War era protesters, those failed protesters of the Iraq War need to rise up and rally because this is a just cause, this is a cause worthy of their sentiment, of their passions, of their sweat and even of their blood, and yet they are silent, not just silent, they are on the other side, these are traitors, these are treasonous beings, these are people who mean nothing and I will say this now to the anti-war movement in America today- Go to Hell - you have lost me forever because you are not the anti-war movement. There is a genocide taking place in Gaza today, there is a horrific conflict that is costing tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians their lives and you are silent, not just silent, but you are on the side of the police."

 -------Former U.N. Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter 

Source: George Galloway, "Israel Will Invade Rafah Because No One Will Stop Them," Mother Of All Talk Shows," You Tube, May 1, 2024  

If This is 1968 Over Again, More Popular Upheaval Is On The Way

By MichaelK. Smith

www.legalienate.blogspot.com

 

Massgraves, the criminalization of dissent, systematic slaughter glorified asself-defense, resisting students making history. Yes, the current nightmare doesseem reminiscent of 1968, the year kaleidoscopic change burst forth seeminglyeverywhere at once.

 

On January31, the beginning of Tet, eighty-thousand Vietnamese troops issued Washington aformal eviction notice, attacking all the major cities and towns of colonialSouth Vietnam. Blasting through the walls of the U.S. Embassy compound, theykilled two military police and holding off a helicopter assault for sevenhours. Government employees arrived at work to find corpses twisted over theornamental shrubbery and pools of blood in the white gravel rocks of theembassy garden.

 

Theyshelled the U.S. naval base at Camrahn Bay and threw open the jails in QuangNgai city, setting thousands free. They marched nearly unresisted into theancient capital of Hue and raised the Vietcong flag from its Citadel. Theyforced the U.S. to raze half the city to the ground at Ben Tre, which anAmerican officer infamously justified on the grounds that, “We had to destroy the town to save it.”

 

Afterendless boasts of imminent victory, U.S. troops being home by Christmas, andthe proverbial light at the end of thetunnel, the Vietnamese Tet Offensive proved beyond all doubt that a U.S.military victory in Vietnam was not in the cards.

 

Wall Streetturned against the war.

 

In March,LBJ discovered his Vietnam policy had left him no path to a second term. Thoughelected in a landslide in 1964, four years later his “Great Society” had turnedto riot and left him a lonely prisoner of the White House. Wherever he went hewas besieged by throngs of outraged students taunting him with “that horriblesong” – “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids didyou kill today?” No matter how many speeches he canceled or how abruptly hechanged his travel plans he could not avoid being “chased on all sides by a giant stampede.” The people were firingthe president.

 

Support forescalation in Vietnam had evaporated. Worried that fulfilling GeneralWestmoreland’s request for 206,000 more troops would leave Washingtoninsufficiently protected against the threat of insurrection at home, a Councilof Wise Men told a shocked Johnson to cut his losses and withdraw from the warbefore it tore the U.S. apart.

 

By then150,000 Americans were dead or injured and much of Southeast Asia had beenannihilated by a U.S. military machine that could do everything but stop. OnMarch 31 Johnson went on nationwide TV to announce his forced retirement: “I shall not seek, and will not accept thenomination of my party for another term as your President.”

 

Four dayslater Dr. King was assassinated for having publicly connected the dots betweendomestic racism and imperial war. A year to the day before he was shot he waswidely condemned for a speech he gave before a crowd of three thousand at RiversideChurch in New York City, where he did not mince words about the war:

 

“The peasants watched as wesupported a ruthless dictatorship in South Vietnam which aligned itself withextortionist landlords and executed its political opponents. The peasantswatched as we poisoned their water, bombed and machine-gunned their huts,annihilated their crops, and sent them wandering into the towns, wherethousands of homeless children wandered the streets like animals, begging forfood and selling their mothers and sisters to American soldiers. What do thepeasants think as we test our weapons on them, as the Germans tested newmedicines and tortures in Europe’s concentration camps? . . . .We havedestroyed their land and crushed their only non-Communist revolutionarypolitical force – the Unified Buddhist Church. We have corrupted their womenand children and killed their men. What liberators!”

 

A yearlater he was in Memphis to help striking Memphis garbage workers. The night ofApril 3 an exhausted and dispirited King was already in his pajamas and readyfor bed when he received a call from Reverend Ralph Abernathy at Mason Temple,informing him that two thousand people had braved tornado warnings and adriving rain to hear him speak. “I reallythink you should come down,” pleaded Abernathy. “The people want to hear you, not me. This is your crowd.”

 

Dr. Kinggot dressed and went out into the stormy night.

 

In theblaze of lights at the podium, he appeared nervous. He told his audience thatif he were at God’s side on the dawn of creation he would ask to see Mosesliberating his people, Plato and Aristotle debating philosophy, RenaissanceEurope, Luther tacking his ninety-five theses on the church door, Lincolnemancipating the slaves, and Roosevelt charting a path to the New Deal. But hewould not dally in those times or places, he said, preferring to move on and experience just a few years in the second half of thetwentieth century, when masses around the world rose up to say: “We want to be free.”

 

Dr. King,abandoned by militants, vilified by the press, stalked by death and the FBI,felt deeply grateful to share in the freedom struggles that heaped his lifewith hardship.

 

With thecrowd shouting its approval, he bellowed that he had been to the mountaintop and seenthe Promised Land. Brushing aside prospects of premature death, he saidthat longevity had its place, but that on that night he was not worried about any thing, not fearing any man.

 

A burningpassion in his eyes, his voice rising to a shattering crescendo, he declaredhis last will and testament: “Mine eyeshave seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!”  

 

The nextday as he was preparing to go out to dinner with friends a bullet exploded intohis face, severed his spine, and brought him crashing abruptly down on thebalcony of the Lorraine Motel.

 

ReverendAbernathy bolted to his side, crying out to those in the parking lot below: “Oh my God, Martin’s been shot!”

 

Dr. King, alook of terror in his eyes, clutched uselessly at his throat. His head lay inan expanding pool of blood. Abernathy tried to comfort him. “This is Ralph, this is Ralph, don’t beafraid.” Reverend King, still conscious, his magnificent voice silencedforever, couldn’t answer. But Abernathy felt he was communicating through hiseyes.

 

In King’smotel room, Reverend Billy Kyle repeatedly banged his head against the wall ashe screamed into the phone for an operator. Dashing up sobbing from the parkinglot, Andrew Young groped for a pulse, then screamed: “Oh my God, my God, it’s all over!”

 

Everywhereat once riots erupted and cities burned.

 

Three weeksafter King’s assassination Columbia exploded in protest. President GraysonKirk, alarmed at the growing youth rebellion, announced that in disturbingnumbers young people rejected all formsof authority, which was just another way of saying that all forms ofauthority were increasingly recognized to have discredited themselves.

 

Hundreds ofstudents promptly took over the university, hoisting red flags, establishingcommunity government, and barricading themselves inside campus buildings.

 

Theypurloined documents from Kirk’s office showing that the university was secretlypromoting classified war research and working to “clean up” the neighborhood bymoving out its Black and Puerto Rican residents. Resurrecting the spirit of theParis Commune, the students debated meaning and tactics, relaxed to Dylan andthe Beatles, and celebrated romance. Two students even got married, escorted tothe center of an applauding circle by a candlelight procession of fellow protestors.

 

Eight daysinto deadlocked negotiations a thousand blue collar police were turned loose onthe defecting sons and daughters of the Ivy League. Attacking with clubs andbrass knuckles, they rioted for three hours, smashing up furniture and beatingeveryone in sight while carrying out a bloody mass arrest.

 

One hundredand twenty charges of police brutality were filed against the policedepartment, the most in its history. Echoing the recently assassinated CheGuevara, Tom Hayden called for “one, two,many Columbias” in romantic hopes of bringing the racist imperial statetumbling down.

 

Days afterthe start of the Columbia revolt, student radicals in Paris surged into thestreets chorusing “all power to theimagination,” propelling France to the brink of cultural revolution andsetting the mighty franc to trembling.

 

Spontaneouslyembracing and kissing in the streets, tens of thousands of students and workersmarched joyously together through the capital, waving red flags and singing theInternationale. Demanding workers’power, peasants’ power, and students’ power, they announced the end ofcooperation with soulless mechanization and bureaucratic arrogance.

 

On The Night Of The Barricades the fierceststreet fighting since Liberation (WWII) shook the Latin Quarter as thousands ofstudents marched in protest, overturning cars and trucks. The police attacked,beating them with clubs and rifle butts, kicking the rebels unconscious anddragging them through tear-gas clotted streets by the hair.  The students fought back with Molotovcocktails, filling them with siphoned gas and pushing vehicles into the middleof the street to serve as barricades. When the police charged, the protesterstorched the cars and retreated behind sturdier lines while building residentstossed down water and wet cloths to aid their youthful comrades fighting withcobblestones.

 

A veteranof the clash reported, “I never felt thegas. I was never more alive.”

 

In 1968,even Catholic pacifists were moved to a more aggressive style of protest. OnMay 17, what became known as the Catonsville Nine entered the Catonsville,Maryland draft board office and doused a pile of draft records with theirblood, then set them on fire with soap chips and gasoline, a homemade napalmrecipe gleaned from a Green Beret handbook. While waiting to be arrested, theyprayed and watched the records burn.

 

At theirtrial they spoke of United Fruit Company keeping Central American land fallowwhile the campesinos starved. Theytold of the CIA overthrowing the elected government of Guatemala and replacingit with a reign of butchers worthy of Hitler. Father Daniel Berrigan told ofhis visit to Hanoi, of the merciless U.S. bombings, of the weaponry certified improved through tests on Vietnameseflesh and bone. He read a statement explaining how simple humanity required thedestruction of the draft files:

 

“Our apologies good friends . . . for thefracture of good order . . . the burning of paper instead of children . . . theangering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house . . . Wecould not so help us God do otherwise for we are sick at heart . . . our heartsgive us no rest for thinking of the Land of Burning Children.”

 

In earlyJune U.S. support for Israeli savagery caused Sirhan Sirhan to temporarily losehis mind. He had been just three years old when a series of violent episodesnear his Jerusalem home scarred him for life. A dynamite bomb hurled byZionists blew up a line of Arab passengers waiting for a bus at the DamascusGate; a sudden burst of gunfire caused an army truck to swerve around a barrierand kill his older brother before his eyes; a British soldier blown up almoston his doorstep left behind a severed leg in a church tower and a finger inSirhan’s back yard.

 

Nineteenyears later Sirhan was living in Pasadena when Israel bombed and napalmedPalestinian refugee camps, subjugating what remained of historic Palestine inthe Six Day Land Grab (1967), a sequel to the driving out of hundreds of thousandsof Palestinians in 1948, among them Sirhan and his family.

 

With hispeople tasting another round of bitter injustice, Sirhan watched Senator RobertKennedy wearing a yarmulke ontelevision and promising to cut off U.S. aid to Arab states while sending fiftynew Phantom jets to Israel. Shocked, angry, horrified, he fled the televisionset in tears, covering his ears with his hands.

 

Hescribbled in his notebook: RFK must die.

 

At histrial for the assassination of Senator Kennedy, Sirhan testified to theassassination of an entire nation:

 

“Well, sir, when you move – when youmove a whole country, sir, a whole people, bodily from their own homes, fromtheir own land, from their own businesses, sir, outside their country, andintroduce an alien people, sir, into Palestine – the Jews and the Zionists –that is completely wrong, sir, and it is unjust and the Palestinian Arabsdidn’t do a thing, sir, to justify the way they were treated by the West.

 

“It affected me, sir, very deeply. Ididn’t like it. Where is the justice involved, sir? Where is the love, sir, forfighting for the underdog? Israel is no underdog in the Middle East, sir. It’sthose refugees that are underdogs. And because they have no way of fightingback, sir, the Jews, sir, the Zionists, just keep beating away at them. Thatburned the hell out of me.”

 

Nobody paidhim the slightest attention.  Inspite of Israel’s constant provocations and attacks, Jews were everywhereportrayed as heroic, avenging victims, Arabs as congenital terrorists, andIsrael’s Six Day Land Grab as a glorious warding off of a second Holocaust.Facts were entirely irrelevant.

 

With hopesof a peace candidate now definitively crushed, all eyes turned to Chicago asthe Democratic Party prepared to nominate Hubert Humphrey there as itscandidate for the presidency. Eighty percent of Democratic voters had chosen tosupport either RFK or Eugene McCarthy in hopes of negotiating an end to theVietnam slaughter. Faced with LBJ’s vice-president heading up the ticket,anti-war protesters vowed to lay siege to the city as a prelude to what theysomehow imagined might become a revolution.

 

Protest wasout of favor in the Windy City. In response to the nationwide riots thatfollowed Dr. King’s assassination, the ChicagoTribune opined that “Here in Chicagowe are not dealing with the colored population, but with a minority of criminalscum,” and urged Mayor Richard Daley not to be like the “spineless and indecisive mayors who muffedearly riot control” in Newark (1967) and Los Angeles (1965). Daley obliged,ordering his police officers to “shoot to kill.”

 

Loathing“longhairs,” Daley refused to issue permits for protest marches, rallies, orsleeping in the parks. He ordered the city Ampitheatre fenced off with barbedwire, put all twelve thousand Chicago police on 12-hour shifts, and mobilizedsix thousand National Guard troops. He posted a thousand FBI agents around thecity and placed six thousand U.S. Army troops outfitted with flamethrowers,bazookas, and bayonets around the suburbs. With police outnumbering protestersthree or four to one, Tom Hayden told members of a New York audience to come toChicago prepared to shed their blood.

 

As summerwaned the Convention convened, and following days of dangerous cat-and-mousegames in the streets between police and protesters, a brownshirt riot ensued.

 

Shouting kill, kill, kill, a squadron ofred-faced, blue-helmeted, club-wielding police charged out of a bus atfull-speed and attacked a jeering crowd of onlookers outside the Conrad HiltonHotel, beating, choking, kicking and macing everyone in their path, includingmedics sporting Red Cross armbands. Like maddened Samurai they mowed theirvictims down, charging again and again, leaving the battered bodies bleeding inthe street. Loading them onto the ambulances, they beat them once more.

 

Eyesbulging with hate, they drove the crowd through the window of the HaymarketLounge, jumping through the glass shards to upend tables and smash everythinginside. They screamed “get the fuck outof here,” and “move your fucking ass,”beating even the startled patrons of the bar. Undeterred by the presence oflive TV cameras, they rioted in clouds of tear gas for seventeen long minuteswhile the surrounding crowd chanted, “Thewhole world is watching, the whole world is watching.”

 

Across thestreet in his hotel shower Hubert Humphrey was briefly overcome from theeffects of the gas, which he never was from the horrors of Vietnam.

 

Whentelevised images of the bloodshed reached the floor of the DemocraticConvention, Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff stepped to the rostrum todenounce the “Gestapo tactics” of thepolice. In an instant Chicago Mayor Daley was on his feet, waving his arms andscreaming in protest: “Fuck you, you Jewson of a bitch, you lousy motherfucker go home.”   

 

As theballots were being cast, footage of the police riot was beamed across thenation. Viewers saw Hubert Humphrey, irrepressible advocate of the politics of joy, nominated forpresident in a sea of blood.

 

Of course,all this was but child’s play compared to the unrestrained violence beinginflicted on the slopes and dinks andzipperheads - otherwise known as the Vietnamese people - by the U.S. warmachine in Vietnam. Two years later in Detroit, Vietnam Veterans gave chillingtestimony as to the type of crimes being committed:

 

“ . . . they didn’t believe our bodycounts. So we had to cut off the right ear of everybody we killed to prove ourbody count.”

 

“ . . . we threw full C-ration cansat kids at the side of the road. Well, just for a joke, these guys would take afull can, and throw it as hard as they could at a kid’s head. I saw severalkids’ heads split wide open.”

 

“The philosophy was that anybodyrunning must be a Viet Cong; he must have something to hide or else he wouldstick around for the Americans, not taking into consideration that he wasrunning from the Americans because they were continually shooting at him. Sothey shot down anybody who was running.”

 

“This was common policy. Killanything you want to kill, any time you want to kill it – just don’t getcaught.”

 

“ . . . the heads of the bodies werecut off and they were placed on stakes, jammed down on stakes, and were placedin the middle of the trails and a Cav patch was hammered into the top of hishead, with Bravo Company’s ‘B’ written right on the patch.”

 

“I saw during my tour 20 deformedinfants under the age of one . . . I thought it was congenital or something,from venereal disease, because they had flippers and things . . . it was commonknowledge that Agent Orange was sprayed in the area.”

 

“Fugas is a jelly-like substance.It’s flammable . . . they explode the barrel over an area and this flaming,jelly-like substance lands on everything . . . people or animals or whatever.”  

 

“You could take the wires of a jeepbattery put it almost any place on their body, and you’re going to shock thehell out of the guy. The basic place you put it was the genitals.”

 

In otherwords, the conduct of the United States in Southeast Asia during the war yearswas nothing short of a complete disgrace. Washington dropped eight million tonsof bombs and nearly four hundred thousand tons of napalm, leaving behindtwenty-one million bomb craters. It killed over two million Cambodians,Vietnamese, and Laotians, wounded over three million more, and scatteredfourteen million traumatized refugees throughout Indochina. It rained downeighteen million gallons of Agent Orange and other defoliants, creating forestsbereft of trees, animals or birds, and cursing the war’s survivors with extraordinaryrates of liver cancer, miscarriages, stillbirths, and birth defects. It left inits wake eighty-three thousand amputees, forty thousand people blinded or deaf,and hundreds of thousands of orphans, prostitutes, disabled, mentally ill, anddrug addicts.

 

The totaleffect was nearly permanent, as journalist Donovan Webster discovered on avisit to Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) in the mid-1990s.  There he saw a storage room stackedfrom floor to ceiling on all four sides with deformed fetuses, the final resultof the Pentagon’s defoliation program begun three decades before. Some weredouble bodies fused together on a single torso, others had malformed faces,many had excess heads, fingers, and toes.

 

Donovanwalked out of the storage room in shock.

 

In anursery down the hall, a roomful of genetically-damaged orphans was overjoyedto meet the U.S. reporter come to visit them from overseas.

 

 

Sources:

 

On Vietnamand the Tet Offensive:  

 

GodfreyHodgson, America In Our Time,(Vintage, 1976) pps. 353-4; Frances Fitzgerald, Fire In The Lake – The Vietnamese and The Americans in Vietnam,(Vintage, 1972) pps. 518-34; George McTurnan and John W. Lewis, The United States In Vietnam, (Delta,1969) pps. 371-3; Douglas Dowd, Blues ForAmerica, (Monthly Review, 1997) p. 153; Lawrence Wittner, Cold War America: From Hiroshima toWatergate, (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978) p. 289; David Harris, Our War (Random House, 1996) p. 89;Gabriel Kolko, Anatomy of a War,(Pantheon, 1985) pps. 308-9; Edward Abbey, Confessionsof a Barbarian, (Little, Brown, 1994) p. 214

 

On MLK andhis assassination:

 

Steven B.Oates, Let The Trumpet Sound – The Lifeof Martin Luther King, Jr. (Harper and Row, 1982) p. 435, 483-6; PBSDocumentary, 1968 – The Year That ShapedA Generation.

 

On theColumbia protests:

 

ToddGitlin, The Sixties, (Bantam, 1987)pps. 306-8; Lawrence S. Wittner, Cold WarAmerica: From Hiroshima To Watergate, (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978)pps. 304-5; Barbara and John Ehrenreich, LongMarch, Short Spring, The Student Uprising At Home and Abroad, (MonthlyReview, 1969) pps. 125-7, 145; Tom Hayden, Reunion,A Memoir, (Random House, 1978) pps. 276-82

 

On theFrench student-worker protests:

 

Barbara andJohn Ehrenreich, Long March, ShortSpring, The Student Uprising At Home and Abroad, (Monthly Review, 1969 pps.73-102 passim; PBS Documentary, 1968: TheYear That Shaped A Generation

 

On theBerrigan brothers and The Catonsville Nine:

 

PhillipBerrigan with Fred. A Wilcox, FightingThe Lamb’s War: Skirmishes With The American Empire, (Common Courage, 1996)pps. 80, 93, 96, 101-5; Daniel Berrigan, TheTrial of the Catonsville Nine (Beacon, 1970) p. vii; William M. Kunstlerwith Sheila Isenberg, My Life As ARadical Lawyer, (Carol Publishing Group, 1994) p. 190.

 

On SirhanSirhan and RFK:

 

Alfred M.Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection – WhatPrice Peace? (Dodd, Mead & Co., 1978) pps. 242-3

 

Note: Aslightly different version of Sirhan’s mental collapse comes from the lateAlexander Cockburn, who says Sirhan was driven over the edge from reading anaccount of the Phantom jets to Israel written by Andrew Kopkind in the Nation. See Jeffrey St. Clair, “RoamingCharges: the Return of Assassination Politics,” Counterpunch, August12, 2016

 

On SirhanSirhan directly quoted from his trial:

 

GodfreyJansen, Why Robert Kennedy Was Killed,(Third Press, 1970) frontispiece.

 

For anhonest account of the Six Day War:

 

NormanFinkelstein, Image and Reality of theIsrael-Palestine Conflict (Verso, 1995).

 

On MayorDaley and protest at the 1968 Democratic Convention:

 

ToddGitlin, The Sixties, (Bantam, 1987)pps. 320-6, Tom Hayden, Reunion: A Memoir,(Random House, 1988) p. 297

 

On theChicago police riots:

 

ToddGitlin, The Sixties, pps. 332-4; DavidFarber, Chicago, (University ofChicago, 1988) pps. 200-1, 249; Daniel Walker, Rights In Conflict, (E. P. Dutton,  1968) pps. 255-65; Mike Royko, Boss, (Signet, 1971) pps. 188-9; Mark L. Levine et al, eds. The Tales of Hoffman (Bantam, 1970); p.124; Lawrence S. Wittner, Cold WarAmerica: From Hiroshima To Watergate, (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978)p. 297

 

On VietnamVeterans’ testimony about war atrocities:

 

VietnamVeterans Against The War, The WinterSoldier Investigation (Beacon, 1972) pps. 5-114 passim

 

Onstatistics of the overall damage done by the Vietnam War:

 

MichaelParenti, The Sword and the Dollar –Imperialism, Revolution and the Arms Race, (St. Martin’s 1989) p. 44; NoamChomsky and Edward S. Herman, After theCataclysm – Postwar Indochina & The Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology(South End, 1979), pps. 7-9

 

On thelong-lasting effects of the defoliation campaign in Vietnam:

 

DonovanWebster, Aftermath – The Remnants of War(Pantheon, 1996) pps. 214-17

 

 

 

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Death of a Prophet

April 3, 1968 - Memphis

 

In town to help striking Memphis garbage workers, an exhausted and downcast Dr. King is already in his pajamas when the call comes in from Reverend Abernathy at Mason Temple, informing him that two thousand people have braved tornado warnings and a driving rain to hear him speak. "I really think you should come down," Abernathy pleads. "The people want to hear you, not me. This is your crowd." 

 

Dr. King gets dressed and goes out into the stormy night. 

 

In the blaze of lights at the podium he appears nervous. He tells his audience that if he were at God's side on the dawn of creation he would ask to see Moses liberating his people, Plato and Aristotle debating philosophy, Renaissance Europe, Luther tacking his 95 theses on the church door, Lincoln emancipating the slaves, and Roosevelt navigating his way to the New Deal. But he would not dally in any of these times or places, preferring to move on and experience just a few years in the second half of the twentieth century, when masses around the world rose up to say: We want to be free. 

 

Dr. King, abandoned by militants, vilified by the press, stalked by death and the FBI, is deeply grateful to share in the freedom struggles that heap his life with hardship. 

 

With the crowd shouting its approval, he bellows that he has been to the mountaintop and seen the Promised Land. Brushing aside prospects of premature death, he declares that longevity has its place, but that on this night he is not worried about any thing, not fearing any man.

 

A burning passion in his eyes, his voice rising to a shattering crescendo, he declares his last will and testament.

 

"Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!" 

 

April 4, 1968  

 

The bullet explodes into his face, severs his spine, and brings Dr. King crashing down, down, down, on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. 

 

Reverend Abernathy bolts to his side, calling out to those in the parking lot below. 

 

"Oh my God, Martin's been shot!"

 

Dr. King, a look of terror in his eyes, clutches uselessly at his throat. His head lies in an expanding pool of blood. Abernathy tries to comfort him. 

 

"This is Ralph, this is Ralph, don't be afraid."

 

Reverend King, still conscious, his magnificent voice silenced forever, cannot answer. His mouth quivers once and then Abernathy feels he is communicating through his eyes. 

 

In King's motel room, the Reverend Billy Kyle bangs his head against the wall again and again, screaming into the telephone for an operator. 

 

Dashing up sobbing from the parking lot, Andrew Young gropes for a pulse.

 

He screams: "Oh, my God, my God. it's all over."

 

American cities begin to burn.

 

Excerpt From The Speech That Got Dr. King Killed: 

 

"The peasants watched as we supported a ruthless dictatorship in South Vietnam which aligned itself with extortionist landlords and executed its political opponents. The peasants watched as we poisoned their water, bombed and machine-gunned their huts, annihilated their crops, and sent them wandering into the towns, where thousands of homeless children roamed the streets like animals, begging for food and selling their mothers and sisters to American soldiers. What do the peasants think as we test our latest weapons on them, as the Germans tested new medicines and tortures in Europe's concentration camps?

 

" . . . we have destroyed their land and crushed their only non-Communist revolutionary political force - the Unified Buddhist Church. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. What liberators!"

 

-----Dr. Martin Luther King, New York City, April 4, 1967

Source for above material:

--------Michael K. Smith, Portraits of Empire pps. 129, 132

Private Profits vs. Social Prophets

Private Profits vs. SocialProphets

 

By Frank Scott

 

 

“…What we see at work is notan expression of the sentiments of the American people; rather it reflects thewill of a powerful minority which uses its economic power to control the organsof political life.”

 

Albert Einstein

 

We entered the massivemarketplace labeled “our democracy” as always long before any election and atthis date hundreds of millions have already been spent both officially and offthe books to insure that ruling power maintains control over Americancapitalism no matter who or what may be elected sheriff, mayor, animal controlofficer or president of the united states. Given that, the spending andconsciousness brutality have already exceeded past experience and, as befittinga system verging on complete collapse and involving much more of humanity thanAmerican voters, the time for global as well as national focus on the status ofan American empire making more people rich than ever before while makingmultitudes far more poor and continuing mass murders in other subject nationsis not only at hand but at all parts of the international political economicorganism.

 

As the fading rulers ofwestern capitalism act more like a crazed rat on a sinking ship but instead ofleaping into the deeps it promotes the entire world into more warfare, massmurder, incredible profits for those who feed on bloodshed and a mentalcondition that might make homicidal maniacs seem critically thinking humanbeings, the natural and especially political environmental reality approachesthe worst fantasy of religious fanatics: eternal damnation in the fires ofhell. This joyful futuristic vision was born of a brilliant past that mightmake the present seem docile since none of the modern weapons existed in biblicaltimes when spears, lances and demented religious leaders operated as rulingwealth as opposed to the lethally armed with weapons of mass murder political andmedia servants of rulers do today.

 

The continuing since 1917American imperial attacks on Russia have reached a disastrous point in the current warusing Ukrainians to kill Russians while they die by the thousands with no hopeof winning and American and foreign munitions makers make billions. Various ofthe NATO lapdog leaders sound even more crazed than Americans and urgebroadening of the war to stop the eternal threat of Russia which exists intheir fevered minds said fever having been planted by America since the end ofthe second world war.

 

Meanwhile, the center ofglobal anti-Semitism, Israel, has exploded as never before with such bloodyhorror that many of the innocent and previously comatose have awakened andexpressed anger and hostility about a situation that has prevailed since 1948when Palestine was engulfed and devoured by the new nation said to have been ahaven for those suffering horror during the second world war. This would belike Japan getting even for the American atrocities at Hiroshima and Nagasakiby invading Mexico, throwing the natives out when possible and making allothers second class citizens once they took over, changed the language andculture to Japanese and proceeded to treat Mexicans worse than Americans everhad.

 

In only one of thousands of contradictionsof logic, language and morality, the European Jews who stole the land continuecalling themselves Semites and screaming anti-Semitism whenever real Semitescommit an act of aggression in retaliation and millions in the western worldhave their brains sunk deeper into an ocean of mental sewage. Like everythingelse in a radically changing world in which previous western dominance is nearingan end and hopefully global freedom is nearer than ever, the radical changesunderway that can spell revolution for the human future can be made to seemmore dismal than ever under the consciousness control of purveyors of theimperial lies now fantastically more powerful than any past relatively tin-potdictatorial regime of later made to seem glorious royals and other pastmurderers.

 

While it seems that thehorrible choice offered voters by capital’s two parties back in 2020 will bethe same in 2024 the only difference is that the divisions among Americans havegrown even worse than before. But as the frustration and anger at both partiesincrease alternate choices, usually written off as foreign plots or nationaldisorders, may finally have space to speak to radical change favoring democracyin substance rather than the bogus brain disease foisted on innocent people whoare told it is freedom and democracy. Of course, and rape is simply an economicform of dating and hundreds of thousands of Americans living in the street aremerely getting close to nature.

 

While political madnessdepicts Putin as a menace to humanity for reacting to an American owned andoperated insurrection in Ukraine and fill voters heads with alleged crimescommitted by Trump which are the everyday reality of political pimps andhustlers who own and operate “our” democracy, especially congress and the whitehouse, Palestinians will continue to be murdered by Israelis financed byAmerican taxpayers proving that our peace loving democracy is just what theworld needs to bring on a nuclear destruction of humanity which is in theplanning stages of our Mass Murder Inc. at the pentagon. This will come to passif Americans do not rise up and create real democracy before it is too late.Among other things that will mean voting against the supposed lesser evil ofthe two party combo of economic cancer and political polio to bring about theend of capitalism and the beginning of a future for the human race that doesnot involve growing poverty for hundreds of millions while a relative handfulbecome billionaires.

 

The opening quote is fromsomeone long admired for something called the theory of relativity, a term noteven vaguely understood by billions of humans, but far more relevant, easilyunderstandable and important is the fact that he was an anti-capitalist, asocialist and an anti-war pacifist, easily understandable by those samebillions and hardly known by most. That and many other hidden facts aboutpeople, nations and political economics should become clearer while we adjustand work to transform a dreadful social reality into a hopeful future by endingwarfare capitalism and bringing about a democratic world such as ourpre-historic beginnings in social and communistic cooperation. And after weclear up some reality about Einstein, we’d all do well by checking out Marx inhis own words and not those of his simplistic and far too often murderousdetractors. He can help us learn more about what we need to understand aboutwhy our reality is crumbling and what we need to do to rebuild it.

 

 

 

*

Einstein on peace pg. 343

 

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Satan of Moscow Calls Out U.S. Hypocrisy

"One anti-Soviet, anti-Russian law is being submitted for another . . . They can't seem to do without it! . . . They talk about human rights in Russian prisons and places of detention. That's all well and good, but they have plenty of problems of that kind themselves. [Look at] Abu Ghraib - or Guantanamo, where people are kept jailed for years without being charged. Not only [that], the prisoners walk around shackled, like in the Middle Ages. They have [even] legalized torture. Can you imagine if we had done anything like that? They would have eaten us alive . . . It would have been a global scandal. 

 

But in their country, everyone keeps quiet about it.  . . . Those so-called secret CIA prisons: who has been punished for that? . . . They are up to the ears in shitty stuff, they're drowning in it, and they still insist on criticizing us.

 

 . . . . I am probably a bad Christian, because as a Christian you are supposed to turn the other cheek. I am not yet morally ready for that. If they slap our face, we have to retaliate. Otherwise they'll go on slapping us forever."

 

                  -------Vladimir Putin, 2012

 

Source: Philip Short, Putin, (Henry Holt, 2022) pps. 561-2

 

Satan of Moscow Calls Out U.S. Anti-Russian Laws

"One anti-Soviet, anti-Russian law is being submitted for another . . . They can't seem to do without it! . . . They talk about human rights in Russian prisons and places of detention. That's all well and good, but they have plenty of problems of that kind themselves. [Look at] Abu Ghraib - or Guantanamo, where people are kept jailed for years without being charged. Not only [that], the prisoners walk around shackled, like in the Middle Ages. They have [even] legalized torture. Can you imagine if we had done anything like that? They would have eaten us alive . . . It would have been a global scandal. But in their country, everyone keeps quiet about it.  . . . Those so-called secret CIA prisons: who has been punished for that? . . . They are up to the ears in shitty stuff, they're drowning in it, and they still insist on criticizing us."

                               -------Vladimir Putin, 2012

 

Source: Philip Short, Putin, (Henry Holt, 2022) pps. 561-2

 

"The Rise of the New Normal Reich" by C. J. Hopkins

A tirade about "totalitarian" Covid policies, the book has some virtues and many flaws, but a footnote on page ninety-three exposes the author's argument as an exercise in sheer hypocrisy. 

 

In the midst of complaining about how the corporate media framed German anti-lockdown protests as a fringe of violent Covid Deniers running amok, Hopkins says this: "Any reference to any kind of 'Deniers' in Germany naturally evokes Holocaust deniers, i.e., nazis."

 

So all Holocaust revisionists are Nazis? Hardly. More importantly, as Hopkins himself makes abundantly clear, as soon as an intellectual nigger category is created it matters not who is assigned to the demonized space. Everyone is forced to genuflect at the orthodoxy, and independent thought is paralyzed. 

 

As we know, long before Covid appeared on the scene, this happened in Germany (where Hopkins resides), a state created by foreign military powers occupying the country after reducing it to rubble. Heresy trials are legitimate there, about which Hopkins says nothing, even as he rages against global capitalist "totalitarianism."

 

If he ever did say anything, he'd be jailed and deported. 

 

No one - not Jimmy Dore, not Max Blumenthal, not Tucker Carlson, not Hopkins, not Matt Taibbi, not Glenn Greenwald, not a single card-carrying ACLU member, has any problem with this. They're all completely full of shit. Even Noam Chomsky, who at least defended Robert Faurisson's free speech rights when he was brought to court on a charge of falsification of history, considered it a point of pride to remain entirely ignorant of Faurisson's actual arguments.

 

That's where we are. No one who makes his living on speech actually believes in free speech.

Fighting Wars By The Rules

 Let's All Kill Each Other According To The Rules

I don't understand the Geneva Convention and the whole idea of having rules for fighting a war.  Why?  Is it really more than just a way of reassuring ourselves we're all quite civilized, as we pour our hearts and minds and fortunes into mass killing?  It seems to me like hypocritical bullshit.  If the object is to win, wars should be fought with no holds barred; otherwise, why bother suiting up?  As it is now, a winner is declared, and yet the issue has not been settled by all possible means.

    Additionally, if the object is to kill the enemy, why treat their wounded?  Treating their wounded requires resources taken from your own effort to achieve victory.  Does this make sense if you're trying to win?  Oh, yeah. Civilized.

    My doubts about having rules for combat likewise extend to street fighting.  I've heard guys whine about someone throwing a "sucker punch."  Are they kidding?  A guy wants to reduce your ass to a small bloody pile, and you're going to warn him before hitting him?  Get fucking lucid!  And lose all that dopey shit about fair play.  It's out of place if the object is to win.  (Is it?)

    Also, as far as kicking someone when he's down is concerned, what is the problem here?  Again, the object is to win, yes?  Well if he gets up, you might lose; therefore he must not get up.  He needs to be kicked.  You said you wanted to win.  Or are you people just fucking around?  I suspect that might be the case.  Well, stop fucking around and make up your mind.  You're telling me a man will fuck another man's wife, drive him out of his business, cut him off and nearly kill him in traffic, but he shouldn't sneak punch, or kick him when he's down?  I don't get it.

    Another thing I don't understand is the objection to the so-called dirty play in sports such as football.  These are big, tough guys who are desperate to prove how manly they are; that they're not soft.  That's why they play these games in the first place.  Well, why not let them play "dirty" and let's find out how tough they really are?

    It's been shown that small, dedicated groups of men can easily find ways of policing and disciplining those among them who cross the line.  It's called vigilantism, and it's very efficient.  Please don't tell a bunch of six-foot six, three hundred-pounders in helmets and pads they can't spear and punch and put their thumbs into each other's eyes.

    You'll miss all the fun.  And you'll be keeping them from pursuing their calling at its highest level.

    I also don't understand terrorists who call the police to warn them about a bomb.  Do I even need to explain my dismay at this one?

    You know, folks, if this old world had any imagination, wars would be fought without codes and conventions, alley fighting would be standard, and the only rules in sports would govern the uniforms.  Then we'd have some real fun.

    But I fear that doesn't suit you, and so I return to the notion that produced these thoughts in the first place:  You people shouldn't be fighting at all.

-----George Carlin, Braindroppings, pps. 179-80

Fake Peace, Real War, and The Road to "Plausible Genocide"

 “We will destroy everything not Jewish.”

-----Theodore Herzl

 

 "We have nosolution, you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave,and we will see where this process leads . . . . You Palestinians, as a nation,don't want us today, but we'll change your attitude by forcing our presence onyou."

-----Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan 

 

" . . . thecommon denominator amongst all the American peace efforts is their abysmalfailure." 

------Cheryl A. Rubenberg

 

USrael's disgraceful conduct in Gaza goes on, and onand on. Leveling hospitals, shooting children in the head; gunning down asurgeon at the operating table, using an emergency call from a little girltrapped in a car with the corpses of family members to lure two rescue workersto her, then killing all three; systematically killing Palestinian journalistsreporting on the slaughter; promising to save three premature babies at ahospital under forced evacuation, then leaving them to slowly die and bedevoured by dogs; singing in chorus of the joy of exterminating Arabs; cheeringthe blocking of food aid to starving Gazans; killing entire families, inducinga Palestinian boy to lay down in the road hoping someone would run over him andend his misery; this is but a small sampling of the consequences of trappingover a million Gazans in the southern half of a 125-square-mile concentrationcamp without food, shelter, or sanitation, then methodically shooting andbombing them while thousands of their relatives decompose under expandingmountains of rubble.

 

Depravity on this scale will not magically disappearby establishing a cease fire and holding peace talks, as urgently necessary asboth those preliminaries are. Only relentless popular pressure on the U.S.government to force it to deny Israel the means to subjugate and murderPalestinians can even hope to lead to de-nazification of theJewish state, without which real peace can never be achieved. Keep in mind thatin the midst of the current wholesale slaughter a large majority of Israelisthink Netanyahu isn't using enoughviolence.

 

Cease fires we have had before, and peace agreements,too, but they didn't solve the underlying conflict because addressing theabsence of Palestinian national rights - the heart of the Palestine conflict -is taboo. 

 

Because of this taboo, massacres of Palestinians are afeature, not a bug, of Zionist ideology, and have stained Israel's history frombefore the state was even formed. 

 

Only the scale of the current Gaza slaughtersets it apart.

 

In June of 1982, for example, Israel invaded Lebanonon a surge of Pentagon arms shipments, seeking to disperse the PalestineLiberation Organization (the Hamas of its day) and poison its relations withthe local population while destroying its political and military structures.Tens of thousands of civilians died as the IDF carved up the country inalliance with Christian fascist militias.

 

While claiming to stand tall for human rights,Washington kept arms and money flowing in support of Israel's occupation of notjust Palestine, but Syria and Lebanon as well. 

 

Lebanon was savagely pounded, leaving people roamingthe wreckage of Beirut in clouds of flies, terror in their eyes, their clothesreduced to rags. Mothers howled, orphans sobbed, and the stench of rottingcorpses filled the air. 

 

Cluster bombs leveled whole blocks. White phosphorousburned people alive. Palestinian refugee camps were blasted to rubble, leftpockmarked with blackened craters that filled with dead bodies and otherdebris. An officer in the U.N. peace-keeping force swept aside by the Israeliattack on Rashidiyeh said, "It was like shooting sparrows with acannon." Asked why houses containing women and children were beingbombarded and bulldozed, an Israeli army officer explained that, "they areall terrorists."

 

Surrounded by tanks, gunshots, and hysteria, onehundred thousand people were left without shelter or food, roaming throughpiles of wreckage. Blindfolded men, handcuffed with plastic bonds, were marchedaway to concentration camps where they were tortured, humiliated, and murdered.Their families were turned over to Phalangist patrols and Haddad forces(Israeli allies), who torched homes and beat people indiscriminately. 

 

At the United Nations, the United States gave itscustomary blessing to Israeli savagery, vetoing a Security Council resolutioncondemning Israel. 

 

Much impressed by Israel's "purity of arms, The New York Times saluted the"liberation" of Lebanon.

 

But it was a macabre "liberation." Afterthree months of relentless attack, the southern half of the country lay inruins. Even President Reagan, as ardent a fan of Israel as any of hispredecessors in the Oval Office, couldn't stomach more killing, and calledIsraeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to stop the "holocaust."Offended at the president's use of this word, Begin nevertheless halted thebombardment immediately.

 

An agreement between Israel, the U.S. and the PLO wassigned with security guarantees for the Palestinians. Yasir Arafat and his PLOfighters left for Tunis. On September 16, in defiance of the cease fire, ArielSharon's army circled the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila.Israeli soldiers set up checkpoints and allowed truckloads of their Phalangeand Haddad allies into the Palestinian camps. The Phalangists came with oldscores to settle and a long list of atrocities against Palestinians already totheir credit. The Haddad forces acted as part of the Israeli Army and operatedunder its command.

 

Perched on rooftops, Israeli soldiers watched throughbinoculars during the day and lit up the sky with flares at night, guiding thesoldiers as they moved from shelter to shelter in the camps slaughtering thedefenseless refugees. In mid-massacre, Israeli Chief of Staff Rafael Eitancongratulated the Phalangist command for having "carried out goodwork," offered a bulldozer for scooping up corpses, and authorized thekillers to remain in the camp twelve more hours.

 

On September 18 war correspondent Robert Fisk enteredthe camps and described what he found there: 

 

"Down every alleyway there were corpses - women,young men, babies and grandparents - lying together in lazy and terribleprofusion where they had been killed or machine-gunned to death. . .  Inthe panic and hatred of battle, tens of thousands had been killed in thiscountry. But these people, hundreds of them, had been shot down unarmed . . . these werewomen lying in houses with their skirts torn up to their waists and their legswide apart, children with their throats cut, rows of young men shot in the backafter being lined up at an execution wall. There were babies - blackened babiesbecause they had been slaughtered more than 24 hours earlier and their smallbodies were already in a state of decomposition - tossed into rubbish heapsalongside discarded U.S. Army ration tins, Israeli army medical equipment, andempty bottles of whiskey. . .. "

 

". . . Down a laneway to our right, no more than50 yards from the entrance, there lay a pile of corpses. There were more than adozen of them, young men whose arms and legs had been wrapped around each otherin the agony of death. All had been shot at point-blank range  . . . Onehad been castrated . . .  The youngest was only 12 or 13 years old."

 

Such were the results of Israel exercising its"right to self-defense," just as the wholesale slaughter andstarvation of Gazans forty-two years later is rationalized on the same grounds.

 

The moral of the story is that no matter howblindingly obvious its crimes are Israel is never guilty of anything because .. . the Holocaust.

 

Forty-seven years ago the London Sunday Times reported that Israel routinely torturesPalestinians, a devastating revelation at the time. The scope of the torture,said the Times, was so broad that it implicated "all of Israel's securityforces," and was so "systematic that it [could not] be dismissed as ahandful of 'rogue cops' exceeding orders."

 

Among the prisoner experiences detailed by the Times'Insight team were being beaten and kicked, being set upon by dogs, having one'stesticles squeezed, having a ball-point pen refill shoved into one's penis, orbeing raped with a stick and left bleeding from the mouth and face and anus.

 

Israel categorically denied the charges, but refusedto rebut, diverting to side issues and attacking Israeli lawyers who stooped solow as to defend Arabs. Seth Kaplan in the staunchly liberal The New Republic rose in defense ofIsraeli torture, arguing that how a government treats its people "is notsusceptible to simple absolutism, such as the outright condemnation of torture.One may have to use extreme measures - call them 'torture' - to deal with aterrorist movement whose steady tactic is the taking of human life." Ofcourse, every state in the world practicing administrative torture routinelyclaimed it was fighting "terrorists," an infinitely elasticdesignation in the hands of national security officials.

 

So what supposedly made Palestinians"terrorists"? Mainly, that they resisted Israel's steady tactic of robbing,swindling, torturing, and murdering all those who had been living in Palestinelong before Zionism even appeared on the scene. But Israel simply couldn'tpublicly admit that Palestine was not what it told the world it was - a land without a people for a people withouta land. It had to keep torturing and killing Palestinians to induce them tovacate the land, but it could never admit this. At the end of 1996, when theIsraeli Supreme Court authorized the torture of Palestinian prisoners, thejustices called it "moderate physical pressure," which sounds morelike massage than torture.

 

Two major Middle East peace agreements have beennegotiated entirely under the prejudiced assumption that Palestinians areterrorists to be neutralized, not an oppressed people entitled to its rights.In neither Camp David nor Oslo was there any indication that Palestiniangrievances were to be seriously considered, much less honestly dealt with. Hadthe obvious issues been faced with courage then, Gazans wouldn't be gettingslaughtered now. But they weren't, an outcome that could have been foreseenjust by looking at the people who produced the agreements. 

 

The Camp David Treaty was negotiated by EgyptianPresident Anwar Sadat, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, and U.S. PresidentJimmy Carter. 

 

Sadat was a former Nazi collaborator whose idol wasthe Shah of Iran, a U.S. client then moving at break-neck speed to Westernizethe country, in the process laying down a human rights record so appalling thatAmnesty International characterized it as "beyond belief." He wasshortly overthrown by the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

 

The year before Camp David Sadat had made his"sacred mission" to Jerusalem to speak to the Knesset, opening theway for peace. But he complied with Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan'sinstructions to delete references to the PLO, and he never got off his kneesafter that. At Camp David he threw himself on the goodwill of the UnitedStates, striving for an agreement so goodfor Israel that Begin would invite condemnation should he dare to rejectit.  Dismissed as a traitor and a fool throughout the Arab world, he wasassassinated three years later.

 

Former head of the underground terrorist group Irgun,Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin was proud of his role in blowing up 95British and Arabs in the King David Hotel in 1946, as well as the slaughter ofover two-hundred Arab women, children and old men at Deir Yassin in 1948. InWWII, the Irgun had offered to support the Nazis against the British. One ofBegin's first acts when he became Israeli Prime Minister was to issue a postagestamp honoring Abraham Stern, whose group made the proposal.

 

The last thing one could reasonably expect out of Prime Minister Begin's cabinet was peace. His military junta included five generals whomaintained cozy relations with apartheid South Africa and the blood-soakeddictators Augusto Pinochet and Anastasio Somoza.

 

As for Begin's territorial ambitions, they wereexpansive, to say the least. The former Irgun commander had been elected on aplatform calling for the annexation of the West Bank and the East Bank of the Jordan River, a goal that the Likud Partyhas never renounced. He regarded the West Bank and Gaza not as occupied but asliberated - from the indigenous Arabs to whom he felt they didn't rightfully belong,and he called the land "Judea and Samaria," Biblical names for God'sgift to the Jews. He openly regarded the Palestinians as Israel's coolies,corralling them into Bantustans even as he promised them full autonomy, which hedefined mystically as self-rule for people, but not for the land on which theylived.

 

The key figure at Camp David, of course, was U.S.President Jimmy Carter, a fundamentalist Baptist and supposedly a neutralmediator between Begin and Sadat. He confessed to having an "affinity forIsrael" based on its custodianship of the Holy Land, and regarded it as"compatible with the teachings of the Bible, hence ordained by God." Ordained by God!  He had "nostrong feelings about the Arab countries," but condemned the"terrorist PLO." Begin he described implausibly as a man of integrityand honor.

 

Carter instructed Sadat that unless his proposals werepatently fair to Israel, whichregarded Arabs as subhuman, Begin would justifiably reject them. When Egypt's openingproposals requested compensation for Israeli use of land and oil wells in theoccupied Sinai, free immigration to the West Bank, Israeli withdrawal from theillegally occupied territories (including East Jerusalem), and a Palestinianstate, Carter was despondent at the "extremely harsh"recommendations. Any treatmentof Palestinians other than as anonymous refugees to be absorbed and pacified incolonial structures was apparently unimaginable extremism.

 

At the time, the PLO was the sole legitimate representativeof the Palestinian people, and its inclusion in negotiations was the onlypossible basis for establishing Palestinian national rights and reaching realpeace. Nevertheless, Carter's national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinskisummed up the U.S. stance at Camp David as "bye-bye PLO." ThePalestinians' nationalist aspirations were summarily dismissed, and a solutionfor the Occupied Territories was postponed until future "autonomytalks," to which the PLO would not be invited. This doomed any prospect ofpeace.

 

Unsurprisingly, Camp David's imagined Palestinian"autonomy" was a substitute for national liberation in the Accords,and was fundamentally colonial. Israel was allowed to retain economic andpolitical power over the West Bank and Gaza, and the Israeli Defense Forceswere permitted to indefinitely remain. The Palestinians were essentiallygranted municipal authority (to pick up the garbage?) provided it didn'tthreaten Israeli "security." Prime Minister Begin openly declared thathe would never allow a Palestinian state on the West Bank.

 

It's hard to improve upon the summation of Camp Davidprovided by Fayez Sayegh, founder of the Palestine Research Center:

 

"A fraction of the Palestinian people (underone-third of the whole) is promised a fraction of its rights (not including thenational right to self-determination and statehood) in a fraction of itshomeland (less than one-fifth of the area of the whole); and this promise is tobe fulfilled several years from now, through a step-by-step process in whichIsrael is to exercise a decisive veto power over any agreement. Beyond that,the vast majority of Palestinians is condemned to permanent loss of itsPalestinian national identity, to permanent exile and statelessness, topermanent separation from one another and from Palestine - to a life withoutnational hope or meaning."

 

Nevertheless, the United States applauded what itsomehow construed as the birth of peace in the Middle East, while Israelproceeded to "annex" Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, tattoo theOccupied Territories with Jewish settlements, carve up southern Lebanon, attackIraq, and bomb Palestinian refugee camps. 

 

None of this was a surprise. According to Israelistrategic analyst Avner Yaniv, the effect of Camp David's removing of Egyptfrom the Arab military alliance was that "Israel would be free to sustainmilitary operations against the PLO in Lebanon as well as settlement activityon the West Bank."

 

Five years after Israel had reduced southern Lebanonto rubble Gaza rose in rebellion (the first intifada), and six years after that came the Oslo Accords, with theWhite House announcing triumphantly for the second time that lasting MiddleEast peace was at hand. But once again there was no peace. In accordance withlong-standing U.S.-Israeli rejectionism the Oslo Accords called for theincorporation of Palestinian lands in a permanent colonial structureadministered by Israel.

 

In other words, after more than seventy years ofsacrifice and popular struggle for their national rights, the Palestinians weretriumphantly handed a micro-state with no power. A toothless "PalestinianAuthority" was set up in the West Bank. 

 

Once again, Israel remained in possession ofeverything that counted: East Jerusalem, the settlements, the economy, theland, water, sovereignty, and "security." The Oslo settlement wasbased on UN Resolution 242, which only recognized Palestinians as statelessrefugees, not as a people possessed of national rights. 

 

Israel made no commitment to giving up its violence orcompensating the Palestinians for 45 years of conquest and dispossession. YasirArafat renounced all nationalist aspirations and discarded Palestinian rights,including the right to resist oppression. He accepted responsibility for guaranteeingIsraeli security, turning his people into police for their occupiers.

 

The Palestinians were granted nothing more than"limited autonomy," with no guarantee of Palestinian security, noPalestinian sovereignty, and no autonomous economy. Israeli companies were toset up sweatshops in the Occupied Territories and Palestinians were to continuesupplying the $6-a-day labor. After years of granting concessions to Israel,they were asked to wait three to five moreyears until "final status" talks could determine what Israel's vaguereferences to "improvements" actually meant.  

 

For the majority of Palestinians living in theDiaspora, this represented the final act of robbery, nullifying years ofpromises from the UN, Arab governments, and the PLO itself. 

 

At the celebration of the Oslo Accords on the WhiteHouse lawn, Arafat, the conquered, thanked everyone for the agreementsuspending most of his people's rights, and delivered an emotionally sterilespeech as though he were reading out of a phone book. He barely mentioned thePalestinians. 

 

Yitzak Rabin, the conqueror, gave a long speechdetailing Israeli anguish, loss, and suffering involved in the conquest. Hepromised that Israel would concede nothing on sovereignty and would keep theRiver Jordan, the boundaries with Egypt and Jordan, the sea, the land betweenGaza and Jericho, Jerusalem, the roads, and the settlements.  He did notconcede that Israel was, or ever had been, an occupying power. He made nocommitment to dismantling the maze of racist laws and repressive fixtures ofthe Occupation. He said nothing about the thousands of Palestinians rotting inIsraeli jails. He expressed not a twinge of remorse for four-and-a-half decadesof ethnic cleansing and lies.

 

So the occupation of Palestine continued for yearsmore, severely restricting Palestinian movement, increasing Jewish colonizationof Arab land, and intensifying bureaucratic harassment. On September 28, 2000,Ariel Sharon and a thousand Israeli soldiers touched off the second intifada byinvading the Al Aqsa mosque site in Arab Jerusalem. The next day Prime MinisterEhud Barak ordered riot police to storm the compound where 20,000 Palestinianswere praying. Rocks were thrown and the police opened fire, killing seven andwounding 220. Within days President Clinton dispatched the largest shipment ofattack helicopters to Israel in a decade.

 

Though portrayed by Israel apologists asextraordinarily generous towards the Palestinians, Prime Minister Ehud Baraknever dismantled a settlement or freed a Palestinian prisoner during his entire18 months in office. Like his predecessors, he refused to compromise onsettlements, borders, refugee rights, and Jerusalem. According to RobertMalley, special assistant for Arab-Israeli affairs in the Clinton administration,it is a myth that Israel had offered to meet "most if not all of thePalestinians' legitimate aspirations," and equally a myth that the"Palestinians made no concession of their own." In fact, Palestiniansexpressed willingness to accommodate Jewish settlements on the West Bank,Israeli sovereignty over Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, and a limit onrepatriation of Palestinian exiles, though allof them were entitled to return. Malley stated that "no other Arabparty that has negotiated with Israel . . . ever came close to even consideringsuch compromises." 

 

Meanwhile, Israel offered nothing and demandedsurrender, just as it always had. 

 

According to Israeli military analyst Ze'ev Schiff,the Palestinians were left with three options:  (1) agree to the expandingOccupation, (2) set up Bantustans, or (3) launch an uprising. 

 

Palestinians chose to fight, and Israel pounded thenearly defenseless civilian population with helicopter gunships, F-16s, tanks,missiles, and machine guns. While systematically assassinating Palestinianleaders, Israel cried "immoral" when its victims turned their bodiesinto weapons in horrific suicide bombings at supermarkets, restaurants, poolhalls, and discotheques. Israeli propaganda blamed "hate teaching" bythe PLO, but the real hate teacher was the racist ideology that defined Palestiniansas "beasts walking on two legs" and "cockroaches in abottle," among other terms of endearment popular with Israeli leaders.This swelled the ranks of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade with volunteers who hadlost close relatives to the Israeli military.

 

Amidst the firestorm of moral indignation occasionedby the suicide attacks, Israel never considered negotiating in good faith toresolve the longstanding conflict, and the United States applied no pressure tomake them do so. Following in the footsteps of a long line of predecessors,President George W. Bush heaped arms and aid on Israel, vetoed UN resolutionscalling for observers in the Occupied Territories, and continued funding theever-expanding Jewish settlements. With the entire world recoiling in shockedoutrage at Israel's pulverizing of the West Bank, he declared Ariel Sharon"a man of peace."

 

Post-Oslo the stealing of land and dynamiting of Palestinian homescontinued with the same justification as before: Jewish land was redeemed, Arab land was unredeemed. By the end of thetwentieth-century, over 80% of Palestine no longer belonged to PalestinianArabs. Under Clinton-Barak settlement construction had accelerated dramaticallyand Jews received nearly seven times as much water as Arabs in the West Bankand Gaza. Meanwhile, three hundred miles of Jews-only highways and bypassroads integrated the settlements into Israel proper while dividing Palestinianareas into enclaves of misery completely cut-off from the wider world.

 

Increasing numbers of Israeli Arabs joined with thePalestinians in the Occupied Territories to protest Jewish supremacy rooted innationality rights granting Jews exclusive use of land, better access to jobs,special treatment in getting loans, and preferences for college admission,among other unearned advantages. Military service brought even more benefits,from which Palestinians were excluded. 

 

Founded as a haven for Jews, Israel had become themost dangerous place in the world for them to live. The constant war onPalestinians that made this so was still described as self-defense, and thecrushing of their national culture was still the goal of "peace."Orwell would have felt like an amateur.

 

Whatever differences President Biden and Prime MinisterNetanyahu may be having regarding tactics and media sound bites, the commitmentthey share is to preserving the festering boil of apartheid Israel, rooted inthe conviction that Jews are a master race of chosen people destined to scrubthe Holy Land of unsightly Arabs and rule over Greater Israel forever.

 

The stench of death is its constant gift to the world.

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Joel Kovel, OvercomingZionism, (Pluto, 2007) p. 224

 

Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects, (Haymarket,2010), p. 160

 

“American Efforts For Peace In The Middle East,1919-1986, quoted in Anti-Zionism:Analytical Reflections, Tekiner, Abed-Rabbo, Mezvinsky, eds. (Amana Books,1988) p. 195

 

Noam Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle, (South End, 1983) pps. 155, 359-71, RosemarySayigh, Too Many Enemies, (Zed, 1994)pps. 117-121

 

21Robert Fisk is quoted fromhis book Pity The Nation in SusanAbulhawa, Mornings In Jerusalem,(Bloomsbury, 2010) pps. 224-6. Abulhawa is a novelist, but quotes verbatim passagesfrom Pity The Nation.

 

[vi]Noam Chomsky, TowardsA New Cold War, (Pantheon, 1973-1982) p. 454n., Alfred Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection, (Dodd Mead,1978) pps. 178-84.

 

Eduardo Galeano, UpsideDown - A Primer For The Looking Glass World, (Henry Holt, 1998), p. 88.

 

Alfred Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection, (Dodd Mead, 1978) p. 153.

 

Edward Said, TheQuestion of Palestine, (Vintage, 1979) pps. 14-15, 44, 57, 138, 195, 204,206-7; Alfred Lilienthal, The ZionistConnection, (Dodd Mead, 1978) pps. 144, 191, 279, 351, 398, 683. NoamChomsky, The Fateful Triangle, (SouthEnd, 1983), p. 95n.; Jimmy Carter, KeepingFaith: Memoirs of a President, (Bantam, 1982) pps. 334, 347)

 

Jimmy Carter, KeepingFaith - Memoirs of a President (Bantam, 1982) pps. 274-5, 338-40; AlfredLilienthal, The Zionist Connection,(Dodd Mead, 1978) p. 651.

 

Edward Said, The Question of Palestine,(Vintage, 1979), p. 212

 

 

Edward Said, ThePolitics of Dispossession, (Chatto and Windus, 1994), p. 244; Larry Shoup, The Carter Presidency and Beyond,(Ramparts, 1980) pps. 120-3)

 

Noam Chomsky, World Orders Old and New, (Columbia, 1994) p. 213.

 

Edward Said, ThePen and the Sword, (Common Courage, 1994) p. 110; Edward Said, The Politics of Dispossession, (Chattoand Windus, 1994) p. xxxiv, xxxv-xxxvii; Christopher Hitchens in Edward Said, Peace and Its Discontents, (RandomHouse, 1993) p. 3.

 

[xv]John Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,(Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 2007, p. 89)

 

Stephen Shalom, "The Israel-PalestineCrisis," Z Magazine, May 2002;Edward Said, "The Desertion of Arafat," New Left Review, September-October 2001; Rezeq Faraj, "Israeland Hamas," Covert ActionInformation Bulletin, Winter 2001; Rania Masri, "The Al Aqsa Intifada- The consequence of Israel's 34-year occupation,” Noam Chomsky International Socialist Review,November-December 2001.

 

Max Elbaum, interview with Phyllis Bennis,"For Jews Only: Racism Inside Israel," ColorLines, December 15, 2000. Edward Herman, "Israel's EthnicCleansing," Z Magazine, April2001. Rene Backmann, A Wall In Palestine,(Picador, 2010), p. 170.

 

 

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